Friday, March 04, 2016

New Zealand's African minorities - many welcomed here as refugees - claim the police are targeting them unfairly and sometimes in a racist manner.

Young Africans have told AUT researcher Dr Camille Nakhid that police have stopped them on the streets or in cars for no apparent reason except their colour, beaten them, called them "n*****s", told them to "go back to your country" and even told them to go back to Mt Roskill when they visited the North Shore.

One young man said: "If they see you as a black man with a white woman in the car ... they pull the girls aside and ask, 'Are you OK?'"

Which goes well beyond the "unconscious" racism the police admit to. When you're calling people "niggers" and viewing inter-racial relationships as possible kidnappings, its not "unconscious", its explicit bigotry. And it has absolutely no place in our police force. If police officers can't refrain from acting like the National Front, then they should be fired.